Musings
by Istalindir
Summary: 'You suppose you shouldn't have felt surprised. Everyone betrays. Even soulmates. Especially soulmates.'
1. Chapter 1

Everyone betrays.

Minions.

Friends.

Family.

You know this, had come to expect it, to find amusement in it, but, somehow, you had never imagined it would end like this. End with Gig.

He was different.

He was your soulmate and you his.

You suppose you shouldn't have felt surprised. Everyone betrays. Even soulmates.

Especially soulmates.

Had things turned out different, you may have turned on him. Devoured him. Left yourself with nothing and nothing and destroyed everything.

You knew yourself to be insane and evil and everything they accused you of. Even now, defeated, you feel no regret. You don't look back on what you did and what Gig did with sadness or horror. If anything you look back on your short reign with what may be happiness, though it's been so long since you'd felt such things you can't be sure. It had been just you and Gig. The others hadn't really mattered, they had been pawns and playthings. You had liked Gig, not loved, you weren't sure there was enough left in you that was human to love, certainly there hadn't been in him.

You were both too broken, too twisted. Fragments don't love. Fragments aren't loyal and both of you were shattered.

Gig came to you broken; mad and evil and finding cruel delight in torment. You had had little interest in such things, but had quickly come to understand his joy.

When you had come to him, been forced to him, you'd been whole. Too quiet, perhaps, but happy in a way you can't now contemplate, let alone understand. You had your family, small though it was. You knew what it was to love and be loved.

Those feelings hadn't lasted. Reality is a harsh teacher and knowledge a cruel whip.

Truth can break people in ways too terrible to comprehend, you've learned this very well.

You think you may have been able to look past it, a destiny you never knew or wanted, had you not been scraped bloody against Gig's broken pieces. Dawning realization and horror had met with madness and you did not come out the better for their meeting.

But, it was truth, in the end, that broke you. Broke you and twisted the pieces beyond recognition.

They say you betrayed the world. That the twisted bits that is all you are turned it's back on everyone. That you refused your destiny to destroy mindlessly, to become a monster in human shape.

Perhaps you had, but you hadn't intended to.

In the beginning, you were simply striking out against she who had raised you and lied to you and been willing to sacrifice you without a thought. She who would have sent you to save a world you didn't know at whatever cost was necessary. You knew she hadn't expected you to survive. You had only been striking back.

Everything else... just fell into place.

And now, at the end of everything, Gig, Vigilance, had become whole, had been forgiven. He had looked down on you, he who was fixed and unbroken once more, and had seen your twisted pieces. Vigilance had pitied you and disdained you and misunderstood you in a way that would have been impossible for your soulmate. Some small portion of Gig, fading swiftly, had looked out of this strangers eyes and reminded him of a fondness already half forgotten. Then, as everyone does, he'd turned away and betrayed you.

You wonder if, later, you will be angry. If you will be sad. If you will feel something other than a numb emptiness where another broken soul used to be.

Soulmates...

Heh.

It could never have been just you and him, together forever. You had been foolish to even partially believe in such an end.

There are no happy endings.

And, everyone betrays.


	2. Chapter 2

Years drift by you like water, cool and deceptively tranquil.

You know you should be content, not happy, never again that, but satisfied if nothing else. After all, you are doing good, slowly atoning for the an ocean of sin. You work and you try not to think.

You try not to think about waking up on a bloody battlefield, aching with soul deep wounds barely healed. Confusion and a slowly dawning horror for what you had done and seen done. You try not to think about the feeling of the Devourlords body dying around you, her twisted affection and madness seeping though your connection like sludge.

You try not to think about your desperation, about how you grasped forgiveness from someone not truly able to grant it. But, most of all, you try not to think about how her soul reached out to you, at the very end, confusion and fever-bright affection coloring the connection before you broke it and left her to her fate. You do your job and try very, very hard not to think.

You tell yourself it was right, that it was Justice. The Devourlord was evil. She was more death than you had ever been. She was rot, decay and she deserved it.

Didn't she?

There is a doubt. A niggling little voice that never stops wondering. How evil was she really? You, Gig, did more than she. You built an empire, you killed and maimed. She.. she slept. She was vague and mad and, yes, evil. But, oh, you were so much worse. Yours was the will that urged her to greater heights, greater powers. She was strong, but broken in so many ways.

You remember loving her a little, for that.

When she curled up inside herself, fragile soul shards that trusted you with control of a body that was hers by birth.. Well, that was as close to tenderness that you ever came near to feeling as Gig.

It hurts to think of her.

To think of the mad affection you shared. To know that, as Vigilance, you left her alone with her enemies. To think of that last burst of confused, almost-love before you shut her out. You don't want to know what followed, what she felt at this last betrayal. It would be too heavy a burden to bear, even for you.

There is nothing but the cycle; death and life, over and over. You watch mortals flit through mayfly lives and ache with envy. How lucky they were. The curse of memories was not laid over them as they were born again and again. You wish you were so lucky. There would be no oblivion for you. No embracing darkness safe from thoughts and past deeds.

That is your dearest wish, nothingness. And escape from the clawing, howling void inside of you. Memories prowl the edges of your consciousness, starving jackals with glinting eyes and shining teeth. You turn your back on them, as you once turned your back on another and try to convince yourself you feel nothing, regret nothing.

You wonder if you will ever earn the forgivness so easily handed to you.

You doubt it.


End file.
